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Polish artist Artur mijewski has been building a body of work that is striking for its
emotional intensity. Seen as radical, this uncompromising art practice constitutes
a meditation on the human condition. It is especially distinctive in its subjects,
which include people who have suffered some past trauma, or who are afflicted
by a degenerative disease or a handicap - individuals rarely portrayed in
contemporary visual culture. Na slepo/Blindly records the efforts of unsighted
people who have been invited by the artist to execute a painting. Art, writes
mijewski, can still perform its classical function and express the most poignant
moments of the human condition.
1 Artur Zmijewski was born in Warsaw in 1966. During his student years, Poland
was liberated from the yoke of Communism and the Cold War ended.2 Between
1990 and 1995 he studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw,
under the tutelage of Grzegorz Kowalski. Subsequently, he began employing
photography and video techniques, which enabled him to record real situations
using a documentary approach. He completed his training at the Gerrit Rietveld
Academie in Amsterdam, in 1999. mijewski is interested in the power of art and
its relationship to politics. Most of his projects aim to focus attention on social
problems or to explore subjects that society tends to ignore. He generally films a
situation that he himself conceives and directs, placing individuals in a controlled
context in order to see how they react. Particularly preoccupied with the
connection between emotional ordeal and its physical expression, he often
explores historical conflict and trauma, such as the Holocaust of World War II and
the relationship between Poles and Jews. In 2001 mijewski began working with a
group of young people from the Warsaw Institute for the Deaf. Improbably, he
formed them into a choir and then filmed them performing the Kyrie from the
Polish Mass by Jan Maklakiewicz in Warsaws Holy Trinity Evangelical Church of
the Augsburg Confession. The result, a film entitled Lekcja spiewu/Singing
Lesson, became the focus of the artists first solo exhibition outside Poland and
was subsequently shown at a number of international events, including Manifesta
4, in Frankfurt. In 2003 mijewski repeated the exercise at the Church of St.
Thomas in Leipzig, Germany, where Johann Sebastian Bach was for many years
the chapel master and where his remains are now buried. In this version of the
project, deaf-mute children perform the Bach cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und
Leben (Heart and mouth and deed and life). The two Singing Lessons were
presented at the MAC from February 6 to March 2, 2008, as part of the Projections
series. Na slepo/Blindly, made in 2010 and presented at the 2013 Venice
Biennale in the exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico,3 explores fundamentally the
same theme, examining perception and the right of expression while also raising
issues concerning the conditions of expression and its reception. Directed by
mijewski, six unsighted people - two women and four men, some blind from birth,
some not - are asked to paint a landscape, an animal, their own house or a selfportrait. As they interact with the colour and physicality of the paint, they
describe what they are doing and the type of image they are making, but they
also talk about their life as a blind person and the cause of their condition.
Working with both hands and feet, they create images that are highly expressive
and dynamic. For his part, mijewski is more than simply a spectator: in his role as
guide, he becomes part of the action. The film records the participants attempts
to visualize or imagine what they are painting, to consider the colours, and to
internalize the structure of their actions and their marks upon the paper. Na s